BEDFORD SQUARE
New Writing From the Royal Holloway Creative Writing Programme
Foreword by Andrew Motion
John Murray £7.99
Read it here first — one of the new writers in this anthology, all from Andrew Motion’s creative writing class, could be the Next Big Thing. It’s a rich selection, with the prose better than the poetry. I’d put a few bob on Tahmima Anam – the extract from her novel-in-progress, The Fasting Month, is a vivid and intriguing slice of Bangladesh in 1959. I also expect to hear more of Ben Gardiner, if the extract from They Said It Was Beautiful, but Jack Wasn’t So Sure is anything to go by — he is full of assurance, energy and genuine originality.
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WHITE GHOST GIRLS
by Alice Greenway
Atlantic Books, £10.99
Someone says on the front of this novel that it is “heartbreakingly beautiful”, and for once this is true — the background of Hong Kong in the 1960s is beautifully evoked, and the central tragedy gives the story an unforgettable intensity. Kate and Frankie are sisters. Their father is covering the Vietnam War for Time magazine. Kate is the quiet one and Frankie has a wild streak. But this world of carnage and communism is no place for teenage rebellion and Kate worries that her beloved sister is being pulled away from her. A real corker of a first novel.
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COUNTRY DANCE
by Margiad Evans
Parthian, £8.99
It is 1850, in the border country between England and Wales. Ann Goodman, born of a Welsh mother and English father, keeps a diary for the benefit of her jealous English lover, Gabriel Ford. In the simplest language, she records the work of the changing seasons — and the unwelcome attentions of her father’s Welsh master, Evans ap Evans. The clash between the two cultures is played out around Ann. “Here is represented the entire history of the Border,” the author says, “just as the living Ann must have represented it herself”. First published in 1932, this is a powerful and poetic tragedy.